Four Ways to Develop Stronger Faculty Partnerships

Your career center can bolster its efforts to reach and assist students by working with faculty members who, like you and your career services colleagues, have a strong desire to help students achieve their goals as professionals. Here are some tips to use to form strong partnerships with faculty:

Share the budget—Invite faculty to collaborate and combine monetary resources for mutual benefit. For example, career services might be interested in purchasing an online career-planning resource. Find out if faculty members who teach first-year students would incorporate the career-planning resource into their classes and, if so, split the cost.

Provide graduate and professional school advising support—Faculty may often take the lead on graduate and professional school advising. Connect with these individuals to determine how your office could assist. Brainstorm resources to offer through the career center that would help students research graduate programs. Consider becoming a host site for free graduate school sample tests through an organization such as Kaplan. Offer to review personal statements or graduate essays for students, and provide targeted mock interviews for students interested in attending graduate school, medical school, dental school, and so forth.

Enlist faculty to teach outside the classroom—When planning events and workshops, consider including faculty as speakers or panelists. Faculty members can provide great insight on their own academic areas for programs about choosing a major. Tap into this resource by, for example, holding an academic majors fair where faculty could staff tables to market their departments and majors to prospective or current students.

Visit each other—Make it a goal to visit each academic department. Introduce yourself to faculty you may not know and make contact with those you do know. Read bulletin boards and show an interest in the department. If the opportunity exists, attend a faculty meeting to learn more about their majors and to market your office. Create ways to entice faculty to visit the career center, too. For instance, hold a faculty social at the career center to facilitate the process of engaging with faculty members.